


on the worst

by fugues



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: Gen, talk of self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 15:48:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/813288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fugues/pseuds/fugues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the worst days, the worst nights, IV - always IV, never Thomas no matter how many times he hears it from their lips - sits alone in his room and touches at his scar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	on the worst

**Author's Note:**

> For the Zexal Fanworkathon; prompt was 'iv, reflecting on his scar'.

On the worst days, the worst nights, IV - always IV, never Thomas no matter how many times he hears it from their lips - sits alone in his room and touches at his scar. Runs fingertips over it and its perfect, clean edges, kisses it with the backs of his nails and thinks about kissing it more deeply with nails; thinks of ripping and tearing until the edges are nothing like clean, nothing like perfect. Because 'clean' and 'perfect', what are words like those to him?  
  
 _Not me,_  he thinks when he thinks those words. And the scar is him, the scar is the boundary lines between 'Thomas' and 'IV', so it should be something of the ragged, broken mess that he is. But instead it's a kind of clinical perfection, all flowing, unshaking lines and clean edges. Something unreal, something that could never have been done naturally. Not even if someone had taken a knife to his face with the steadiest of hands.  
  
(Tron's hands would have been the steadiest, wouldn't they?)  
  
(Tron had never cared enough to feel regret that night)  
  
No, though, it had been unnatural instead. The reminder of the twisted child Byron had become - as if IV's whole life hadn't become a reminder of Tron - and the powers he held, the proof that he was so far gone as to think a permanent facial scar a fitting punishment for messing up. And when that 'messing up' had been the refusal to leave a twelve-year-old girl to die, too.  
  
So perhaps the scar is right as it is. Clean and perfect aren't words for IV but the fact it's from Tron, that's... right. Because IV belongs to him, IV is a tool of revenge rather than a person and Tron has  _owned_  him since the moment he numbered them. Thomas had still been alive when he'd first become IV, buried deeper and deeper over time under the weight of everything IV did for Tron, and then there had been that night and he'd gotten the girl out but left Byron's son behind.  
  
But isn't that fitting? Because what had faced him in the darkness, the thing that had come to him as he'd staggered out of that place with Rio, had left all of Byron behind, hadn't it?  
  
They'd stood there and faced one another as IV and Tron and they'd been the most alike, then. They'd been the two shells with nothing behind their eyes any more and perhaps, he thinks, in that moment, Tron had been scared. Tron had seen himself reflected in IV and he'd been scared, for a moment, of what he saw there, so he'd shattered the reflection with those two perfect lines across IV's eyes, as surely as one would shatter a mirror so that no reflection could be seen amongst the spiderweb of cracked glass.  
  
(it had burned, he remembers, burned and glowed like a brand but not bled)  
  
(no; the bleeding had come later, when he'd torn off his dressing over and over in his sleep and woken with blood blinding his eye, when he'd feared each morning that he'd lost what little sight remained in that eye until he washed the blood away and breathed a sigh of relief at the spotty, blurred vision returning)  
  
IV wonders what he thinks of it now, what the Tron-Byron-Tron thing their father has become thinks of the scar.  
  
Does he regret it, he wonders?  
  
 _No,_  IV thinks, laughs at the thought because there is not nearly enough of their father in that child for him to really regret it. Perhaps he would regret it if it were Thomas, rather than IV.  
  
But Thomas is dead. Rio didn't die in that fire but Thomas did, and unlike Byron - Byron, who'd come back a little even if he's still the twisted child for the most part - he died for real.  
  
He's gone, and that's what drags IV's fingers and nails away from his scar on the worst days, the worst nights.  
  
 _To remember,_  he tells himself each time; to remember that Thomas died because IV served Tron, to remember that it was Tron's hand that had choked some of the life from him so surely as it was Tron's hand that had made the scar itself.  
  
To remember that he'd been a person once upon a time, even if he isn't any longer.


End file.
